Bernard Malamud

Hollywood sports movies: Do fans love losers as much as winners?

2011-10-28 16:36:46

<![CDATA[Hollywood sports movies: Do fans love losers as much as winners?]]>

The Reading Life: The nine best baseball books

2011-03-31 00:00:00

Five years ago, on the eve of the 2006 baseball season, I put together a list of nine favorite baseball books — one for each inning, one for every player on the field. Such a list was not meant to be definitive (how could it be?), but since then I'...

Five summers, memorable for the reading

2011-05-22 00:00:00

1974: Unhappy at summer camp, I holed up in my bunk and read Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Bernard Malamud's "The Natural." The camp might have been awful, but the books were anything but. 1980: In June, I attended a writers conference at UC...

Critic's Notebook: In Discover Mode

2011-05-22 00:00:00

For me, summer reading has always been about freedom. Not the freedom to dumb down with mindless entertainment but the freedom to wise up, to be ambitious, to pursue the passions that, during the rest of the year, often take a backseat to the...

Batter up! 9 baseball books to kick off the season

2011-03-31 16:34:51

Movieland Mystery Photo [Updated]

2011-02-07 16:33:11

'Backing Into Forward: A Memoir' by Jules Feiffer

2010-03-14 00:00:00

Backing Into Forward A Memoir Jules Feiffer Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 450 pp., $30 Whether newspapers live or die, the prognosis for the comic strip doesn't look promising. The extinction of the form not much more than a century after its birth would...

"Blockade Billy" by Stephen King

2010-04-17 00:00:00

It's hard to write good baseball fiction. The game is so unlikely, so bizarre at times, that it's a challenge to the fiction writer's imagination to do it justice. Who, for instance, could have invented Johnny Damon's at-bat in the ninth inning of Game 4...

Catching up with the National Book Awards

2009-09-17 08:53:48

Joel and Ethan Coen's latest brings the oy vey

2009-09-29 16:34:39

Writers and editors

2008-12-28 00:00:00

Writers and editors George MacDonald Fraser, 82; author of the "Flashman" series of historical adventure novels (Jan. 2) Gilbert A. Harrison, 92; editor of the New Republic, helped launch new talent (Jan. 3) Philip Agee, 72; former CIA official wrote...

High-minded lowdown

2008-05-04 00:00:00

In the long and often embarrassing history of intellectuals' attempts to grapple with pop culture, there are, at least, a few high points. One of them is the work of the late Leslie Fiedler, the garrulous and provocative critic of literature who could...

Roger W. Straus Jr., the blunt, theatrical Guggenheim heir who co-founded one of the great publishing houses, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died Tuesday, May 25, 2004, of pneumonia at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 87. Straus was among the last of the true old-fashioned publishers.

2004-05-27 00:00:00